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Proof-of-Concept Port of XBMC to SDL 2.0 and Wayland

Posted by Unknown on from the now-with-more-bling dept.

hypnosec wrote in with news that XBMC has experimental Wayland support now. Even better, it's implemented by porting XBMC to SDL 2.0, something that will become important as SDL 1.2 development officially ended and SDL 2.0 should be out in the wild in the not-too-distant-future. The code is only a few days old and has a few serious limitations (input is broken and a bug in weston with threaded clients causes rendering hangs) , but it seems like a pretty good start. The port should also bring SDL 2.0 support to the X11 backend.

15 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. WHAT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What is XBMC?
    What is SDL?
    What is Wayland?

    FFS TFS needs some TLC.

    1. Re:WHAT by dead_user · · Score: 5, Informative

      XBMC = XBox Media Center - http://xbmc.org/ SDL = Simple DirectMedia Layer - http://www.libsdl.org/ Wayland = http://wayland.freedesktop.org/

    2. Re:WHAT by PineHall · · Score: 5, Informative

      What is XBMC? What is SDL? What is Wayland?

      FFS TFS needs some TLC.

      XBMC is a "software media player and entertainment hub for digital media".

      SDL is Simple DirectMedia Layer and "is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer".

      "Wayland is a computer display server protocol and a library for Linux implementing that protocol."

    3. Re:WHAT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      wrong, this is slashdot, not the sunday paper

    4. Re: WHAT by BLKMGK · · Score: 2

      So what you got out of this is that XBMC has something to do with games?! You might better hit the search engine again

      --
      Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
  2. I'm more excited by emulator support :-) by BLKMGK · · Score: 2

    http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=146711

    NES, SNES, MAME, and others. I'll admit Wayland and SDL are interesting but my hardware already runs XBMC fine using VDPAU and I'm more excited about getting the ability to run games vs a different display technology...

    --
    Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
  3. Re:Wise use of time and effort? by EmperorArthur · · Score: 2

    Really? I thought the story was "Ubuntu team declares interoperability and standards are for losers."

    --
    So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
  4. "Proof of Concept" by timeOday · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is a "proof of concept" in the same way that turning over a shovelful of dirt is a proof of concept for digging a basement. The "concept" isn't at issue; it's all the gruntwork and polish that would be required to make it good enough to displace what's already out there and working. With software, the first few function points appear to solve the crux of the problem, but unfortunately the vast majority of function points still remain and each is just as time-consuming, yet less rewarding, than the first few.

  5. A good idea by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It is always a good idea to use a platform independant library to make porting between different platforms easier. Now that it is working on Wayland, one hopes that Ubuntus plans to fracture the Linux ecosystem can be averted. One thing that people need to remember about the situation situation with Canonicals arrogant plan to attempt a coup d'etat of the Linux graphics stack, is that unlike the window manager where choice is a good thing, having a lot of competing window systems is NOT a good thing. Lets imagine that Canonical announced that it would start using its own kernel, and that this Kernel would not support POSIX, but its own proprietary API. Now Linux applications would not be able to easily run on Ubuntu, and applications for Ubuntu would not be able to easily run on Linux. Having a bunch of incompatible window systems is as bad as that. The Window System is basically the kernel for GUI applications. Basically Canonicals Mir announcement is pretty much does the same, applications must talk to the Window system, so the Window system is as important as the kernel for application cross compatibility between OSs. Canonical is fracturing the Linux ecosystem and trying to greedily and arrogantly grab control of the Linux graphics stack and basically one of the most critical parts of the Linux ecosystem. Canonical's behaviour is outrageous and the Linux community should not tolerate this.

    I think now is the time for other Linux Distros to commit to Wayland, leaving Canonical isolated.

    We also need to start a petition to get Canonical to commit to wayland and stop trying to develop its own window system.

    I also think that Wayland should be made a part of the Linux Standards Base. Perhaps the rights to use of the Linux trademark for companies such as Canonical who blatantly ignore Linux standards should be revoked.

    1. Re:A good idea by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 3, Informative

      Or just install x.org or wayland from the repository while your at it throw another DE like cinnimon kde or xfce and while you are at
      wipe out unity problem solved

      --
      ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
    2. Re:A good idea by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Thats fine if its a word processor. The problem is that all applications rely on the Window System. You can choose your own word processor, and it affects little else. But, a bunch of incompatable window systems would be a disaster, it would actually take away your choices because now some software runs on window System A, but not window system B, so you end up not being able to use one block of software or another block of software. The good thing about X is that it has been used on all distributions, meaning you could run all Linux software on any Linux distribution, or on any other Unix OS, such as FreeBSD.

      It is important to have standards. The same thing applies to web pages. If every person who made a web page decided to make their own incompatable HTML and use their browser to look at it, it means if you used another browser you could not get to their web page.

    3. Re:A good idea by dbIII · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think now is the time for other Linux Distros to commit to Wayland

      How about waiting until it has proved it works and has advantages first. While a dumb framebuffer can theoretically perform better than something with a few layers of abstraction it hasn't done so yet, especially since some of those layers of abstraction in X are quite lean.

  6. Re:Wise use of time and effort? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wayland is not an interoperable standard.

    You've got ubuntu wanting Mir.

    You've got Fedora wanting Wayland.

    And everyone else uses X, the ancient legacy (and therefore old bad crufty and slow---even though it can run happily on a Sun 3/60) display server that inexplicably has cool features that the others lack. But that's OK because we keep being told how no one uses those features anyway.

    X is the interoperable standard, and frankly much better.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  7. Re:Wise use of time and effort? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You can run X on top of wayland. The misinformation and misunderstanding of what wayland is and what it's trying to accomplish is astounding given the information is a click away.

    Touche.

    You can run X on top of anything. That really means very little: you can run it on top of OSX and Windows too. You can't remote Windows or OSX apps using X11 and X11 apps on OSX and Windows are second class citizens: copy/paste is non functional beyond plain text and DnD does not work. Furthermore, you cannot manage the native windows with an X11 Window Manager.

    Make no mistake: X11 on Windows and OSX is a poor user experience and it wil be the same on Wayland for the same reasons.

    Remember, you can still run X on top of Wayland.

    Stop saying that. It's an idiotic think to keep saying because whit true, it is entirely deceptive.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  8. We're dropping SDL from XBMC by opdenkamp · · Score: 3, Informative

    SDL will soon be dropped from XBMC. I'll quote Cory here to explain things:
    "This is an interesting POC, however it’s not really in fitting with how we had planned to handle wayland. I recently rewrote our egl handling so that we can dynamically support various windowsystems on the fly, so that we can have a single binary capable of running X11/wayland/framebuffer. It was explicitly written with wayland in mind. See https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/commit/2b49c791eb236ae4fe2be90ac7e7b8ccf0aad72f for the pull, and https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master/xbmc/windowing/egl/EGLNativeType.h for the interface.

    It’s very pluggable, and I suspect it’d be far less work than what you’ve done here. I was hoping to get to it ages ago, it just hasn’t been a priority yet.

    We’ll be dropping SDL soon, since we prefer our own abstractions. See here: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/1175"